User Reviews

Version Info: 11.0b6
Purchased Date: November 01, 2008

Accounting System Manager, HDA, Inc.
November 15, 2011

Pros

CDA provides the only known solution to logically archive historical data out of GP. It's particularly useful for companies that have a large amount of data and who wish to keep their active databases down to a manageable size. It's easy to use, and the ability to pause some of the archive processing makes it easy to spread the activity over several days/weeks/months, depending on the size of your databases.

Cons

If you set up multiple archive companies, it can be a challenge to locate where exactly the archived data is stored. In our case, we set up archive companies by year (2006, 2007, etc) because our databases are so large we didn't think it would be efficient to move everything into a single archive company. However, since CDA archives records based on a set of conditions being true, things may not end up in the year of the original transaction - they could wind up in later years if the archive criteria isn't satisfied until a later time frame. This requires queries that use historical data to seach through all the archive companies in case the records were archived in a later year.

Another downside is that the archive process could conflict with other interfaces you might have with the GP database so it probably should be run off-hours - and it doesn't have scheduling abilities so it requires someone to monitor it either at night or on the weekend.

Overall

Overall, I would recommend CDA to those companies looking to remove inactive data from their production database(s). It's generally easy to use and does what it promises to do. Potential buyers should be aware, though, that it is very resource sensitive - if you have a large database without a very powerful server the archive process could extend to many weeks or months.